Creating Responsive Early Childhood Environments

Catalog description

This course focuses on creating home, community, and classroom environments that are responsive to the individual strengths and needs of each child in the setting, and attuned to their cultural and linguistic characteristics. The theoretical and practical bases for developing environments that are grounded in the concepts of caring, mutual respect, trust, safety, and valuing each member of the community will be explored. This course will investigate both social aspects of responsive environments –approaches to responsive caregiving, caring communities, and fostering positive peer relationships –and physical characteristics, such as scheduling, room arrangement, materials, and physical adaptations. Opportunities to explore responsive approaches such as relationship-based programming, modeling and encouraging classroom communities, strategies to promote self-determination, and tiered interventions for promoting social-emotional competence, including positive behavior supports, will be integrated into the course through observations and hands on experiences. 10 hours of fieldwork is required.